A Test of Longetivity
by miilky
Summary: Life and Death made a bet. Ichigo lived. Rukia did not.


**A/N:** An edited version of a Tumblr story I posted a while back.

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He imagined death so much it felt like a memory.

His mother died protecting him from death. Her death assured he would live. But for how long?

Where was his death? He did not think it would take him long.

Ichigo had not prepared to live. It was a depressing choice of words, _unprepared to live_ , but it was the truth.

Unlike many people, his death was written in the stars. It was carved in constellations and told stories of bold and dangerous adventures. He knew his life was not meant to be long-lived, but the cosmos decided differently.

In defiance of those constellations and their stars, the cosmos commanded he would outlive the many. There were missed chances where it was obvious, without a fact, that this was the moment. Death was here, and it was there.

Death came and went, but it never came for _him_.

His wife died prematurely. She had been sick for some time, and she died in the bed they shared for a short but fairly nice time in their lives. As she died, she rested in bed and smiled. Ichigo saw her smile, and while everyone else thought she was smiling at him and their son, he knew this was not the case.

Her hand grasped, and it clutched around another hand invisible to most of the attendants in the room. Ichigo could be not sure, but he imagined the hand was as dark as ash, as night. Its holder held eyes that were greener than emerald, and deader than dead.

Nonetheless, this was all conjecture. What mattered was that his wife was dead, and she reached death with the utmost satisfaction where Ichigo sat there as his son sobbed pitifully beside him. He briefly thought, _"There was no pain,"_ and similar thoughts, but those thoughts traveled swiftly to its main root.

Solemnly seated, Ichigo realized he was the one to be left behind, again, and that he had missed out on something he would be deprived of for a very long time.

When his best friend died, he was in the kitchen. His name was printed in great, bold letter on the television screen, and Ichigo recalled the dumb shock, the striking blow to his chest he recognized as denial.

Someone as strong as him, as immovable as a mountain, killed in a vehicle accident on his way back home from America?

No, no, no, Ichigo groaned and clutched his head. The dish he was washing was forgotten in the sink, broken into itty, bitty pieces.

Death did not rely on preconceived notions. It did not rely on human standards and understanding. It did not explain itself to anyone, and Ichigo, for all his exceptional standards, was not an exception.

If his friend's death succeeded in one thing, it was getting Ichigo to think, and Ichigo tended to think a lot after the funeral. He envisioned someone must have been waiting for his friend, just as he knew someone had waited for his wife.

A butterfly, yes, he missed those black, almost transparent butterflies. They never stayed long, not long enough to hold or touch, but he always felt them on his shoulder.

He imagined a person dressed in white and black robes waited for them as well, observing the essential details to the death, and they guided his friend and wife to their rightful places on the other side.

Would it be the same for him? Ichigo wondered. He suspected this would not be the case for him. Life was never so kind to him.

Ichigo did not want to die. He wanted to live, but he did not know how he could have lived. His life on the mortal plain was mundane, far too mundane for his preference. But for some inexplicable reason he was forced to endure in the world of his birth, and so, he did.

Years progressed steadily without drastic change. His friend did not drop like flies, but they withered, crinkled off the tree of life like winter tarnished leaves. Their time simply came, and he accepted that.

As he approached his one-hundredth and eighty-fifth year, he quietly mused the turn of events leading to this constipation of life and death. How did he become the remainder of so many lives?

"Your reiatsu sustains more than it should, and this is a byproduct of it, Ichigo," Urahara warned him countless years ago, "you will die, but you may not die for quite some time."

It was less than fun. He slowly degraded into a relic of a bygone era—an immobile, drained memory of a life long ago lived.

There were opportunities. He could live as he pleased, as Kazui told him. He tried to convince his father this after his mother's funeral, but Ichigo refused, citing there was no reason for that. Confiding in his son for his thirst of freedom was impossible. He and Kazui, for the love they shared for one another, were too different to grasp their feelings.

He never imagined he would do other things other people could and would do. He was not out to change the world. Constantly rotating on its axis, the world underwent routine changes, and there he was, Ichigo Kurosaki, forced to live in a world he did not belong with people he did not belong with.

"I suppose I win," Uryuu rasped on his ninety-eigth birthday, and Ichigo knew it was his eighty-sixth birthday due to the firework bursting in the sky, coloring darkened clouds in bright reds and blues, "I'm sorry Ichigo," weathered eyes crinkled in pain, in regret, in anger at this treatment, "I truly am."

Ichigo shrugged, "No big deal," and the last of his friends severed their ties with Life and took Death's hand and walked away.

His brow folded in frustration. He strained to see what could not be seen. Where were they? He knew they were there.

So Ichigo lived…and lived…and lived some more until he was nine hundred and ninety-nine years old, and at their insistence, he lived with his son's family. Kazui lived up to one hundred and five and no more than that.

His son was graced with his father's longevity, and personally, was extremely fond of the living world. He lived on the stories of his parents' adventures, but saw no appeal to them, nothing of substance.

But it came to be on cool, autumn afternoon, Kazui slipped down the steps leading to his back yard garden. He loved his vegetables more than life, and when his head made contact with the stone path at the bottom, there was no coming back.

How do you explain it to his father? What do you say? Kazui wanted to live, and Ichigo wanted his boy to live. He was angry and saddened, and tossed away his grief and rage to the rain, as he did in the past.

The Kurosaki Clinic did not expand beyond family hand. The family was known to have an abnormal gene permitting certain family members to see spiritual presences. Ichigo was their beloved if grumpy, if cranky great-great-great grandpa whose tall tales occupied the children.

His stories were consistent for the most part. He was not the best of storytellers, but there were believers. And they stayed close, knowing Great-Grandpa was a polite moniker that did not indicate his true age. He was more than enough proof for the truth to his tales.

Ichigo did not know many of them knew how old he was. He could never tell. Kazui was a virile man, and the count of grandchildren seemed to grow every year. He never told them, even during his less than lucid moments. It was as if he was afraid to reveal a secret he protected himself from.

For Life was equally unfair to Death. Its morbid humor was timely.

He had not prepared to live this long. It was a game of tug o' war over his life and death. Death and Life had played this game for nearly two hundred years, and at some point, Life finally called quits and handed Death the end of the rope. By doing this, Death immediately concluded Life was giving him the middle finger.

Because of all the ways to die, Ichigo was positive accidental choking on a cough drop was not on his list.

Because greater, mightier, and divine creatures had tried their go at him and failed, and to be honest, it did not seem fair that this was the way Life decided to kick him out.

"Are you fucking kidding me?"

"You could've gotten a glass of water, would've helped the candy go down."

Nearly one thousand years passed since they had last seen each other. Still, the haughty if amused expression on her face was as clear as it was the day he met her.

Her eyes scrutinized his corpse, "Hmm…is this what you call aging?"

"One, it was a cough drop." He snapped and starred at the thinned but uniquely handsome, if calling a wrinkled prune of a body that used to be Ichigo Kurosaki handsome was acceptable, "and two, I was given water and still choked, and three, for someone nine hundred and ninety-nine years old, I think I look better than most people my age."

Her arched eyebrow cocked at him, "One thousand."

"What?"

"One thousand," she corrected evenly and crossed her arms. Her haughtiness glowed beside him, and he didn't know if he wanted to do with her, "Don't tell me you forgot your birthday was two days ago. Old age did not befit you at all, Ichigo."

"For fuck's sake." He slapped his forehead and gripped her shoulder, "Can we just go already? I've waited a millennia for this."

"For death?" She scoffed, rolling her eyes impudently at him, "You've waited all these years for death, to die? You were given seven lifetimes when most souls would sell themselves for a fully formed one."

"Yeah, I was waiting for death, and she took her time."

Her violet glare softened in response, seemingly understanding what neither would ever say aloud, and she stared at his corpse, murmuring softly, "Are you ready?"

Her upper teeth started to grind on her lower lip, "Are you ready," she repeatedly softly, suddenly aware at how real this was, realizing the possibilities previously closed were now fully open, "Ichigo, are you truly ready?"

Of the stories he told his family, of the stories that were passed along from generation to generation, the one of the death cold shinigami was the most famous. She was responsible for saving his life the second time. She was the one who gave him power beyond possibility.

She was the fairy tale the children said to how he stormed the prison where she awaited her execution for saving his life; how she had transformed his world into one they could only dream about.

As families should, they would mourn him. He overstayed his earthly welcome, waited far longer than any man should, and as families did, they would move on from his death.

Life waited for them. There was no reason to worry.

His fingers twined around hers, clasping firmly, strung together as if they never parted in the first place, and when she did not pull away, a soft smile played on his lips, identical to the smile playing on hers.

Death poured colorless light into his room, purer and quieter than freshly driven snow. Those doors parted and opened to the home he dreamt was beyond his reach, and with her hand in his, he pulled them towards infinity.

As the doors slid to a close, a black butterfly passed over the corpse and fluttered near a young child's finger. Her curly, strawberry blond hair was tied in two pigtails. She could not find tears to fill in the spaces of what she witnessed.

The butterfly flapped its wings patiently, waiting for her to approach the bed, and when she did, seating beside the cold body, it made its final ascent.

She tilted her head over his face, and picked the cough drop off of his lips. Stuffing it in her dress pocket, she hopped off the bed and hurried to the living room where the adults were, "Momma, Momma, the rain's stopped!"

At the exact hour when Ichigo Kurosaki died, it had rained for exactly five days straight. It could have been a coincidence, or it could have been fate, but the moment he breathed his last, the rain cleared. And sunlight trickled down on his shrunken body, still carrying a ghost of a smile on his lips.

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 **A/N:** I wrote this for a deathberry prompt months ago, and I came back to it. It needed a little polish. Honestly, every time I think of 1,000 year old Ichigo all I think of is a wrinkled, prune baby. It's pretty funny in my head.


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